Outdoors I turned the points of my wide jacket collar against my throat and walked up the Alton pike two blocks to Doc Appleton’s office. The trolley car released from waiting at the turnout by the trolley that was going westward into Alton as my father and I left the school swayed up the pike, full of gray workers and standing shoppers coming home, going eastward toward Ely, the tiny town at the end of the line. I had lost perhaps ten minutes. I hurried and, having told Penny to pray, prayed Let him live, let him live, do not let my father be sick. The prayer was addressed to all who would listen; in concentric circles it widened, first, into the town, and, beyond, into the hemisphere of sky, and, beyond that, into what was beyond. The sky behind the eastward houses already was purple; above, it was still deep daylight blue; and behind me the sky beyond the houses was aflame. The sky’s blue was an optical illusion that, though described to me in General Science class by my father himself, my mind could only picture as an accumula tion of lightly tinted crystal spheres, as two almost invisibly pink pieces of cellophane will together make rose; add a third, you have red; a fourth, crinkling crimson; and a fifth, such a scarlet as must blaze in the heart of the most ardent furnace. If the blue dome beyond the town was an illusion, how much more, then, of an illusion might be what is beyond that. Please, I added to my prayer, like a reminded child.

Doc Appleton’s house, which had his office and waiting-room in the front part, was a custard-colored stucco set deep on a raised lawn sustained by a sandstone wall a little less than my height. On either side of the steps up to the lawn there were two stone posts topped by large concrete balls, a device of exterior decoration common in Olinger but rare, I have since discovered, elsewhere. Abruptly, as I raced up the sloping walk toward the doctor’s door, all the lamps in the homes of the town began to burn-as in a painting the slight deepening of a shade will make the adjacent color glow. The broad line between day and night in this instant had been crossed.

please ring and walk in. Since I was not myself a patient, I did not ring. I imagined that somehow if I did, Doc Appleton’s accounts would be thrown off, like a check book with an uncashed check from it. In the vestibule of his house there was a cocoa mat and an immense stucco umbrella stand ornamented, higgledy-piggledy, with chips of colored glass. Above the umbrella stand hung a small dark print, frightful to look at, of some classical scene of violence.

The horror of the spectators was so conscientiously dramatized, the jumble of their flung arms and gaping mouths rendered with such an intensity of scratching, the effect of the whole so depressing and dead, that I could never bring myself to focus on what the central event was-my impression was vaguely of a flogging. In the corner of the print, before I snapped my head away as if from the initial impact of pornography, I glimpsed a thick line-a whip?-snaking about a tiny temple etched with spidery delicacy to indicate distance. That some forgotten artist in an irrevocable sequence of hours had labored, doubtless with authentic craft and love, to produce this ugly, dusty, browned, and totally ignored representation seemed to contain a message for me which I did not wish to read. I went into Doc Appleton’s waiting-room on my right. Here old oak furniture padded in cracked black leather lined the walls and encircled a central table laden with battered copies of Liberty and The Saturday Evening Post. A three-legged coat rack like a gaunt witch glowered in one corner and the shelf above its shoulder supported a stuffed crow gone gray with dust. The waiting-room was empty; the door of the consulting-room was ajar and I heard my father’s voice asking, “Could it be hydra venom?”

“Just a minute, George. Who came in?”

With the broad bald face of a yellowish owl Doc Appleton peered out of his office. “Peter,” he said, and like a ray of sunlight the old man’s kindness and competence pierced the morbid atmosphere of his house. Though Doc Appleton delivered me, I first remembered him from a time when I was in the third grade and, worried about my parents’ fights, bullied by older boys coming back from school, ridiculed at recess for my skin whose spots under the stress had spread to my face, I came down with a cold that did not go away. We were poor and therefore slow to call a doctor. On the third day of my fever they called him. I remember I was propped up on two pillows in my parents’ great double bed. The wallpaper and bedposts and picture books on my covers beside me all wore that benevolent passive flatness that comes with enough fever; no matter how I wiped and swallowed, my mouth stayed dry and my eyes stayed moist. Sharp footsteps disciplined the stairs and a fat man wearing a brown vest and carrying a fat brown bag entered with my mother. He glanced at me and turned to my mother and in an acid country voice asked, “What have you been doing to this child?”

There were two strange facts about Doc Appleton: he was a twin, and like me he had psoriasis. His twin was Hester Appleton, who taught Latin and French at the high school. She was a shy thick-waisted spinster, smaller than her brother and gray-haired whereas he was bald. But their brief hook noses were identical and the resemblance was plain. The idea, when I was a child, of these two stately elderly people having popped together from the same mother had an inexhaustible improbability that made them both seem still, in part, infants. Hester lived with the doctor in this house. He had married but his wife had died or disappeared years ago under dark circumstances. He had had a son, Skippy, years older than I but like me an only child; my father had had him in school and the boy had gone on to become a surgeon somewhere in the Midwest, in Chicago, St. Louis, or Omaha.’ Across the mysterious fate of Skippy’s mother there lay this further shadow: Doc Appleton be longed to no church, neither Reformed nor Lutheran, and believed, they said, in nothing. This third strange fact I had picked out of the air. The second, his psoriasis, my mother had revealed to me; until I was born only he and she in the town had been blighted by it. It had kept him, my mother said, from becoming a surgeon, for when the time came for him to roll up his sleeves, the pink scabs would be revealed and the patient on the table in fright might cry, “Physician, heal thyself!” It was a pity, my mother thought, for in her opinion Doc Appleton’s great talent lay in his hands, was manipulative rather than diagnostic. She often described how he had painted and cured a chronic sore throat of hers with one fierce expert swab of a long cotton-tipped stick. She seemed to have thought, at one time in her life, a lot about Doc Appleton.

Now he stooped toward me in the dimness of his waiting-room, his pale round face straining to focus on my brow. He said, “Your skin looks fair.”

“It’s not too bad yet,” I said. “It’s worst in March and April.”

“Very little on your face,” he said. I had thought there was none. He seized my hands-I felt that fierce sureness of touch my mother had felt-and studied my fingernails in the light filtering from the brighter room. “Yes,” he said, “Stippled. Your chest?”

“Pretty bad,” I said, frightened I would have to show him.

He blinked massively and dropped my hands. He was wearing a vest but not a coat and his shirtsleeves above the elbow were clipped by black elastics like narrow bands of mourning. A gold watch-chain formed a shifting pendulous arc across the brown vest of his belly. He wore a stethoscope around his neck. He switched on a light, and an overhead chandelier of brown and orange glass held together by black leading plunged pools of shine onto the wash of magazines on the central table. “You read, Peter, while I finish with your Dad.”